THE KEYS TO THE CITY

Each December, in a hallowed and happy tradition, members of the Tribune's arts and entertainment staff have gathered to pick their choices for Chicagoans of the Year in the arts. This is the 11th year of our annual ritual, and the standards for selection remain the same as they were in the beginning: We look for individuals who have had a bountiful year in their own careers and who, in the process, have contributed both pleasure and advancement in the arts to their city.

Having selected our special Chicagoans, we then get them together for a group portrait that, in its way, reflects the great variety and vitality of the arts in Chicago. This year, for example, the Chicagoans ranged from playwright to painter, and from museum president to jazz trumpeter.

As is our custom, we took our group portrait in a significant city space. On this occasion, the space was the new rehearsal room carved out by Lyric Opera of Chicago in its massive ongoing renovation project from the bowels of the old Civic Theatre. Sixteen of the 22 Chicagoans of the Year, a diverse and lively group, were able to make the photo date.

We are delighted and proud to present these Chicagoans of the Year in the arts, listed in alphabetical order:

Brad Armacost was the mainspring of one of the big small success stories of the theater in 1995. As owner of the TurnAround Theatre at 3209 N. Halsted St., he gave the tiny new space its first major hit with Brian Friel's "Faith Healer," a production that became one of the year's most acclaimed dramas. Picked up later for a second engagement at the Steppenwolf Studio Theatre, the play, with Armacost again devilishly engaging in the cast, repeated its success.

Gerald Arpino, artistic director and co-founder of the Joffrey Ballet, relocated his internationally known, financially pressed troupe here after months of talks and rumors and dramatically rechristened it the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. The company's future in the city has yet to play out, but the initial move resulted in an important, and emotional, event in city dance.

Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, marked his fifth season as CSO artistic chief and the 25th anniversary of his association, as both pianist and conductor, with that institution. Within and outside the CSO, opinions remain divided about some of his interpretations and his leadership skills on the podium. But few will dispute his musical gift, or his capacity for taking on projects (seemingly all at once) that would exhaust a lesser musician. There is no doubt he has exerted a major impact on the orchestra, the way it is run and how it is perceived outside Chicago. The trustees recognized as much when they renewed his contract for another three years, through the 1999-2000 season.

Al Booth, founder and producer of the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts Series and the annual Do-it-Yourself "Messiah" and president of the International Music Foundation, is one of the great heroes of Chicago music. This was a particularly rich year for him, because it marked the 20th anniversary of the annual sold-out, sing-along performances of Handel's "Messiah" at Orchestra Hall, a Chicago tradition so popular it has spread to many other parts of the country. It also marked the 18th year Booth has produced the free weekly noontime series of young artists' recitals in Preston Bradley Hall of the Chicago Cultural Center. These Hess concerts are attended by 390,000 people each year and reach thousands more via the live WFMT-FM radio broadcasts.

Orbert Davis, virtuoso jazz trumpeter, won the $10,000 first prize in the Cognac Hennessy Jazz Search, took the role of Miles Davis in a historic concert re-creating the trumpeter's famous "Sketches of Spain" music and played lead trumpet in several extraordinary performances by the Chicago Jazz Ensemble.

Kurt Elling, adventurous jazz singer, and Laurence Hobgood, brilliant pianist, released the best jazz record of the year, "Close Your Eyes" (Blue Note), and triumphed at several of Europe's top jazz festivals. Their Chicago engagements invariably sell out, and in 1995 they scored successes in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Montreal, among other music capitals.

Robert Falls, Goodman Theatre's artistic director, guided his home theater to a distinguished season, contributing a large-scale, delicately nuanced "Three Sisters" to the main stage. He also took New York by storm, staging a Tony Award-nominated revival of "The Rose Tattoo" on Broadway, energizing Nicky Silver's comedy "The Food Chain" off Broadway and picking up an off-Broadway Obie Award for his direction of Eric Bogosian's "SubUrbia."

Dannie Flesher, along with his partner Jim Nash, went through a triumphant and tragic year. The Wax Trax record label and store they founded brought hipness and flash to Chicago in the early '80s, and became the home of industrial disco, a particularly aggressive brand of electro-dance music that exploded in the '90s, led by Wax Trax progeny such as Ministry. After declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992, the label became a commercial power with the financial help of New York-based TVT Records. Coming off of record sales of $4.4 million in 1994, this year the label had three bands on a top-10 soundtrack album for the "Mortal Kombat" movie and its best-selling album ever, KMFDM's "Nihil." At the height of the label's success, however, Nash died Oct. 18 of AIDS-related illnesses. Flesher, his companion of 25 years, vowed to carry on.

Laurence Gonzales, Evanston-based essayist and novelist, graced 1995 with "The Hero's Apprentice" (University of Arkansas Press), a series of essays about the various kinds of people--firefighters, competition aviators, tightrope walkers and so forth--who dare daily to face swift and bloody destruction.

Martha Lavey, already a fine Chicago actress and self-described "class monitor to the world," became the artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre in its 20th anniversary season, immediately establishing herself as a savvy executive presence for that multitalented, multicontentious ensemble.

Eileen Mackevich, executive producer of the Illinois Humanities Festival, imaginatively rounded up a wide and starry range of attractions for the annual three-day November jamboree of speakers, panelists and performers who spun out infinitely interesting variations on the 1995 theme of "Love and Marriage."

Frank Orrall relocated the rock band Poi Dog Pondering from Austin to Chicago in recent years after the band was dropped by Columbia Records. Working on a shoestring budget, Orrall nonetheless kept his 10-piece band (often augmented by a string quartet and backup singers) and its elaborate, ecstatic live show afloat, while putting together a lush, layered album, "Pomegranate." Its dark-into-light textures suggest an epic, life-and-death journey, not unlike that undertaken by his companion, Brigid Murphy, a saxophonist in Poi Dog Pondering, but better known as the orchestrator of the hilarious variety act "Milly's Orchid Show." Murphy's recovery from lymphomic cancer was joyously reaffirmed when the Orchid Show made its triumphant return last summer.

Gordon Quinn, co-founder and president of Chicago's much-admired Kartemquin Educational Films, has specialized for three decades in producing industrial films and internationally renowned, prize-winning documentaries. This year Kartemquin had its highest profile ever. One of its films, "Hoop Dreams" (which Quinn executive-produced), scored big in critics' awards and became a cause celebre when it was not nominated for an Oscar.

John Schmitz and Fred Solari, who don't even carry formal titles in their new enterprise, this fall transformed the rejuvenated Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave., into a happy, interesting showcase for Chicago dance companies medium-sized and smaller. The pluck and perseverance of their "Dance Chicago '95" programming--Gus Giordano's zip combined with Bob Eisen's off-the-wall experimentation in one memorable segment--was a bracing addition to the city's dance scene.

Jim Sherman, Chicago's most popular playwright, reasserted his mastery of light domestic comedy with the long-run hit "Jest a Second" at Victory Gardens Theater, and then, wearing his actor's hat, gave an ingratiating performance with his wife, Linnea Todd, in Jeff Sweet's comedy "With and Without," at the same theater.

Adrian Smith is chairman of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, which in 1995 served notice that it had recovered from the office building bust of the late 1980s and re-emerged as a vigorous force in Chicago architecture. The firm won a national design award from the American Institute of Architects for its restoration of the Martin Theater at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park and completed an acclaimed renovation of the Ravinia complex.

David Snyder, an artist who had not exhibited for five years while he worked to take representational art where it had seldom gone before, finally showed at the Maya Polsky Gallery in May a group of phenomenally detailed drawings that played games with how and what we see.

Thomas Wikman, founder and music director of Music of the Baroque, celebrated the 25th anniversary of his chorus and orchestra. That MOB has survived and, indeed, prospered for a quarter of a century amid the economic uncertainties of the local music business is, in large measure, a tribute to his sure, steady leadership.

James N. Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, who conceived the cultural event of the year, the Claude Monet retrospective that was the most thorough and intelligent in 20 years and possibly was recognized as such by the nearly 1 million people who saw it.